"Over the past few months, we have listened to feedback, talked with our localisers, studied the trends of our Firefox Yandex builds, and reviewed the Yandex user experience. All this activity led us to the conclusion that our Russian users really wanted direct access to the Yandex search services."

Money matters

Although Anderson says nothing about the financial implications of the move, it's well known that Mozilla relies on the worldwide Google deal for a share of the resulting advertising revenue.

At the last accounting that was worth close to 90 per cent of Mozilla's revenues, so it's clear that Yandex must be offering a similar revenue-sharing deal.